Vital medical trips for Belarusian children are being delayed as Ireland seeks exemption from a travel ban
THE VESNOVO children's asylum is a burst of vivid colour against the brown fields and grey skies of autumnal Belarus. The long, low building in red, yellow and white is a striking sight in this poor farming region south of the capital, Minsk, and a beacon of modern care and therapy in a country blighted by poverty, an outdated health system and the toxic legacy of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
Vesnovo is home to about 150 children with mental and physical problems. Among them are Olga Nikitko, Kristina Nikityonok and Igor Shatsko, all aged eight who play and learn in a bright classroom while waiting to go to Ireland for crucial medical treatment, journeys that have been jeopardised by Belarus's threat to ban children such as them from travelling abroad.
Irish diplomats met counterparts in Minsk this week as part of an effort to secure an exemption for Ireland to a ban imposed when Tanya Kazyra (16) refused to return to Belarus from California in August after spending the summer with a US family.
The ban, which is not the first of its kind to be imposed by autocratic president Alexander Lukashenko, shocked families across Europe and the US who give Belarusian children an annual break with the kind of good food and medical care that is beyond the means of their parents. Many are desperately poor and live in areas contaminated by fallout from the 1986 meltdown at the Chernobyl atomic reactor, in what was then the neighbouring Soviet republic of Ukraine.
As talks continue over whether Belarusian children will be allowed to travel abroad for medical care and rest-and-recuperation visits, Kristina, Olga and Igor face a potentially dangerous delay to their treatment.
"Without the operations, Olga and Kristina would find it very difficult to move around properly, and Igor's pressure sores need to be dealt with. If they aren't, they could get infected and gangrene might set in, which could ultimately kill him," says Marie Cox, medical co-ordinator of the Cork-based Chernobyl Children's Project International (CCPI).
A lack of basic medical supplies badly hampers care in Belarus, though Adi Roche's CCPI has brought massive changes to the Vesnovo orphanage.
The standard of care in here has changed dramatically since CCPI got involved in 2000, Cox says. "We pay local care staff and nurses, and a medical team comes out from Ireland every month. The kids have physiotherapy and massage, and the conditions are unrecognisable from those we found when we arrived."
"Then the narrow beds were like coffins, there were no nappies, the smell was dreadful, flies covered the children in summer, and there was no hot water for half the year. There were no qualified staff on any of the units, and the kids were in bed 24 hours a day, having food shovelled into them. Basically, they were just waiting to die."
The staff of CCPI are well accustomed to the difficulties of working in Belarus, where the inefficiency and corruption of most post-Soviet states are exacerbated by the fact that ultimate power lies with Lukashenko.
The former state farm boss appears to be deeply suspicious of the West and all its manifestations in Belarus, including charities such as CCPI that take thousands of children abroad each year for rest and recuperation.
As well as temporarily banning Belarusian children from foreign trips, in the past he has also vilified the "consumerist" tendencies that they supposedly acquire from their host families in the West, and made it harder for foreigners to adopt his nation's many orphans.
Irish efforts to win an exemption from the travel ban are vital not only for children like Igor, Kristina and Olga, but also for Belarusian youngsters who hope for respite breaks in Ireland at Christmas and next summer.
Many of them have mental and physical problems which receive good treatment in Ireland, most are from grindingly poor families, and some are from areas contaminated by the Chernobyl disaster.
In the village of Zhitkovichi, which was under the radioactive cloud that floated across much of Belarus in April 1986, seven-year-old Anastasia Baranovska flicks proudly through photographs of her summer in Ireland.
"I had a great time, went to an aquapark, sang and danced and played with Irish kids. It would be so good to go again," she says in one of two tiny rooms that are home to her family of seven.
"She was so well when she came back home," recalls her father, Alexander. "She got to see a bit of the world, and perhaps we could never do that for her ourselves."
To the north, in the small town of Starye Dorogi, Oleg (15) and Elvira (10) also well remember happy summers spent in Wexford and Waterford.
They live with foster parents Sergei and Natasha Gudkovsky and six other youngsters in one of the CCPI's Homes of Hope, which the charity buys and holds in trust for couples who ultimately take ownership of the property after raising orphaned and abandoned children for 15 years.
"All of them were in hospitals and orphanages, because their parents had left them or had died," says Natasha Gudkovsky. "Now they are part of a proper family where they are loved and everyone gets along."
Since it was founded in 1991, CCPI has delivered more than €70 million in aid to areas affected by the Chernobyl disaster. It gives food supplies to some of the region's poorest people, provides at-home medical help to children whose parents may otherwise struggle to care for them, and regularly flies in a US surgical team to cure a common defect dubbed "Chernobyl heart".
Next week, a building team of hundreds of Irish volunteers will finish Vesnovo's first sheltered housing unit. For its residents, wheelchair-bound Sasha Goldayev (19) and Alexander Lyovkin (20), it will offer a degree of independence and dispel fears of a future inside an adult mental asylum.
Meanwhile last weekend Lukashenko was returned to power in an election in which no opposition candidate won a seat, and which was heavily criticised by western election monitors. Time will tell if Lukashenko will lift his ban and allow his country's children to travel.